CERGAS Seminar "Hybrid professionalism in the public and healthcare sector: state of the art and future directions"

Abstract

The seminar will include two pieces of work on hybrid professionalism in the public and healthcare sector and interactive identity work of professionals in management.

Professionals appointed with managerial roles working in public organizations are expected to act as the junction between the professional and managerial domains, and to add value by spanning organizational and professional boundaries. At the same time, their role urges them to cope with conflicts emerging from such complex organizational contexts. In the last decades, a wide variety of approaches have enlivened the debate on this topic, mainly – but not exclusively – with regard to the role of hybrid roles in the health-care sector. Through descriptive investigations, the paper explores the results of a systematic literature review and propose a classification of the emerging approaches.

Hybrid professional managers appear less effective in introducing management into public professional settings than policymakers hope. To date, research has offered little understanding of professionals’ identity transition challenge and the role of social interactions underpinning this process. We studied the identity work of hybrid doctors inside a large public health-care organization, finding that it takes place through processes of familiarizing with management, rationalizing being a hybrid, and legitimizing the new role-identity. We contribute to the literature by showing that identity work is distributed and enabled by social interactions beyond the professional group. Implications for policymakers and executives are discussed.

Giorgio Giacomelli (2019) The role of hybrid professionals in the public sector: a review and research synthesis, Public Management Review, DOI: 10.1080/14719037.2019.1642952

Marco Sartirana, Graeme Currie & Mirko Noordegraaf (2019) Interactive identity work of professionals in management: a hospital case study, Public Management Review, 21:8, 1191-1212, DOI: 10.1080/14719037.2018.1549269